Trek Portrayals Of Futuristic War Is Unrealistic

There is an episode on VOY called "Prototype". It was learned that the Cravics and Pralors each developed AI soldiers and ships to fight so that they would not have to risk their own lives in battle.

But aside from this one obscure episode, all of the major fighting done in Trek is by manned spaceship fighting in person. And upon further thinking, it just doesn't make sense. Why are people risking their lives to fight in person, let AIs fight it out!

IMHO, by the time of Trek, especially TNG era, AI is very advanced. It must have occurred to someone, "Hey let's send AIs to fight while we stay safely far away."

I mean IRL of today, we are building drones, autonomous vehicles, etc. There will be a time IRL that all nations use drones and AI ships, AI planes, AI soldiers to fight.

So the in-person fighting of most Trek episodes is wrong and only VOY "Prototype" episode got it right.

Opinions?

 

"Prototype" showed what happens: everybody dies. That's not a worthy goal in a war, I'd think, because traditionally dying=losing.

It shouldn't take practical experimentation to establish the above. Which is likely to be the reason for most of the heroes and villains never even trying. (Kirk did, once, and half a thousand good men, women and BEMs died.)

A more forward-thinking use of AIs would be to restrict future wars to pure simulations. Both sides press a button on a box, and the side whose lamp lights up red loses and concedes. (If he doesn't, well, "A Taste of Armageddon": billions die. So each leader pressing the button is accompanied by a bodyguard who holds a nice old-fashioned knife to his throat and only accepts "I concede" as an answer.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

The concept of AI was never adequately explained in Star Trek. On the one hand we have Data who is this super advanced android AI and seems to be unique in Star Trek yet we have holograms gaining sentience every other episode. AI would have been much further along in any of the Star Trek eras and should have been more prominently explored. Even without android's there should have been a lot more robots doing the mundane day to day and/or dangerous tasks.

My "In head canon" is there is some moral opposition to AI and robots in the Star Trek universe that keeps people from using them often. Kind of like genetic modification. Maybe there was some sort of AI war in the past like in the Dune universe.

 

"Let's just use AI!" - the inhabitants of Exo III. (All dead)
"Let's just use AI to fight!" - the inhabitants of Minos. (Also all dead)

 

Star Trek's goal is to be entertaining, not realistic.

 

Sci-fi in general is filled with cautionary tales about sentient AI becoming a human hating douche, the Federation seems to have learned from this and doesn't want its own Skynet or Matrix or whatever. And to be fair, a lot of attempts at sentient AI in the Trek universe have had negative consequences. Even Dr. Soong had trouble with Lore before he perfected his work with Data.

And yeah, battles and warfare in general are not realistic at all in Star Trek or sci-fi in general. As much as I hate seeing this touted as a "scientist's bible" The Expanse actually does have a somewhat accurate look at what space combat would be like, with ships being so far distant from each other that they never see each other. In Star Trek, the scale is dramatically increased, with ships capable of FTL speeds there could easily be light-years between opposing ships. And indeed, in TOS we kind of saw this a few times in that the Enterprise and the ship it fought against were travelling at warp while they fought. In the other shows, especially in the Dominion War it gets kind of silly that the ships do their fighting at sublight speeds and essentially just bitch-slap each other while within spitting distance of each other. Though, to be fair, it does make for more exciting television/movies than the realistic approach, and indeed even what we saw on The Expanse eventually led to the ship getting boarded and far more exciting close quarters personnel combat taking place.

 

In addition, the concept of drone warfare really hadn't sunk into the popular culture during the time that most of Trek was written.
Our imagination is often shaped by our reality so if Trek were to be written now, you might see more extensive examples of independent or controllled drones being used in warfare.

 

Elon Musk won't like living in the 24th century.

 

But that's approaching space conquest with the same sort of unrealistic conservatism as when starships go pew-pew at visual ranges.

Surely a conqueror would start by clandestinely dropping a tiny container of powerful poison, and then send an ultimatum calling for unconditional surrender or everybody dies within three days. Once the victim surrenders (or dies, it's his choice), antidote gets delivered in a fashion ensuring absolute and eternal servitude (or death, again feel free to choose).

The invading force only needs that one container and then one ship distributing the antidote. The victim is the one requiring logistical support if he's to try and somehow wriggle free. Heck, have it be him who builds the mighty space fleet that delivers all the loot to your doorstep. If he tries to deliver anything else, he's dead.

This logistically lightweight war can still be fought because anybody can launch a poison canister...

...But all his horses and men can't keep that ship in fighting trim if there's battle. Key to survival in battle involving effective defences such as Trek shielding would be self-repair, and the Borg have one working approach to that while the others have taken another.

What resources would be scarce? If Earth suddenly ceased to exist, truly starfaring folks could build another out of the materials found in Sol system already, including the people. By venturing a bit farther out, they could build a dozen spare Earths.

It's really vice versa. Why bother to go to war when you already have it all? And the ages-old answer is, so that the other guy has nothing. Because else he makes sure you have nothing.

But you are talking about two separate things. Why should AI and robots go hand in hand? Surely AI would be more effective without robotics and vice versa - robots are for dumb labor, after all, and AI goes beyond the limitations of mere flesh/metal.

Star Trek has advanced AI - all the starship computers pass the Turing test, even when rules of modesty apparently require mutilating their vocal cords. Starfleet also has advanced androids. But combining the two never seemed like a popular idea in Trek, and indeed there wouldn't appear to be pressing reasons. Data and his folks are marketing gimmicks for Soong's great invention, but (hence?) they remain unique in a world awash with AI and robotics.

Of course, the real world is rife with examples of limitations not apparent from the technologies used. In WWII, with precision long range naval cannon, what did the ships try to do? Dash as close as possible to the enemy, to avoid high-angle fire and make better use of their armor belts. What do the pilots of superfast jet aircraft with BVR missiles do in order to defeat their enemy in practice? Slow down, turn tight, look around with their helmet-mounted sighting devices, and ultimately down the enemy with a stupid cannon. How does the infantryman with his kilometer-range rifle evolve for the modern battlefield? By adopting a glorified submachine gun and rushing to bayonet distance of the opponent.

Heck, DS9 fighting is very akin to WWI naval warfare, in which point blank ranges and unholy melees decide the outcome due to shortcomings in communications, the range of secondary and tertiary weapons vs. the rate of fire of the primary ones, etc. Just negate communications with suitable jamming, and it's every ship for herself. And if you can't get your shorter-ranged beam weapons to bear, you may outnumber your enemy but he will still outgun you thanks to sending his lesser ships up your face.

Timo Saloniemi

 

And Eminiar VII - AI kept everything stagnant, as if they all were just as well dead - they acted that way once they got orders to walk into a suicide booth. Kirk had a point that the two planets' peoples needed to actually talk with each other and have some basic agreements and tolerance, for real peace. It's a miracle the appearance of a mystery ship in the planetary system didn't have Ventikar and Eminiar both blowing each other to bits.

 

I don't expect realism from Star Trek.

 

I suppose it's arguable for TOS at least, the way you "conquer" a planet is not to land ground troops, but to destroy the entire population from space. It's what the Mirror Enterprise planned for the Halkans and perhaps offers an explaination why General Order 24 exists. I suppose it may also be why the Klingon and Romulan "empires" don't seem to have any subject races, they were annihilated and then the planet and its resources annexed with no resistance.

 

Yeah a great shame we never saw any Klingon subject races ("Kuve") on screen and only had the few descriptions in The Final Reflection!

 

It's true that lots of Trek, and Sci-Fi in general, feature stories with the message that you don't want to use AI to fight wars because it might turn against you. But there are simple fixes:

• Don't Use Sentient AI just plain AI that can't think or feel but will just accomplish the mission
  
• Install Auto-destruct or Kill-switch feature in case AI fighting equipment gets out of control

I would also like to add that unlike lots of other aspect of Trek that might never come into being such as warp drive, replicators, teleporters, I can definitely see our real-life world in the future where planes, ships, tanks, etc. are all drone or AI controlled (just like in VOY "Prototype"). And when those AI controlled planes, ships, tanks, etc are let loose, I'm sure they will build safeguards and kill-switches.

 

But then, all the AI rebels stories always featuring the rebelling AI somehow neutralizing fail-safes that are meant to keep it compliant.

 

Yeah, like Colossus.

 

In Star Trek it seems like AI are too likely to self destruct due to logic bombs. How many AI did Kirk get to self destruct or found a relatively simple solution to end its existence by the end of the episode? Even the Cardassian/Dominion's Defense system AI was fooled by Starfleet crackerjack engineers within an hour or so at Chin'toka to blow itself up. The AI in Star Trek seems much more likely to do something to either kill all the people it is designed to protect, or be fouled up by human or other species critical thinking skills. Even Data would sometimes fall into these traps, but survive because the crew cared enough to make sure he was online.

Even the supposedly ultra advanced Iconian defense system virus system could be wiped by turning off the computers and doing a system restart from backups like half the problems current day computers have where you can correct it just by turning it off and on again.

With those sorts of faults and seeming design issues, along with the idea that a sentient race should fight and suffer on their own accord rather than just let the computer decide who lives and who dies like it was a war game with a body count that needs fulfillment for treaty reasons, it seems that AI are intentionally avoided by many species in Star Trek.

 

There's so many realism problems with how war is portrayed in Trek, you're only scratching the surface.

Besides that all the fighting is done directly with large less maneuverable base ships instead of releasing lots of small maneuverable individually cloaked fighters and drones, it's usually done coplanar. Ships really shouldn't be moving slow enough to track with the naked eye either.

I agree they'd probably use non-sentient AI. They'd have crew members giving the orders but the drones smart enough to analyze the situation and come up with better strategies to execute those orders.

And, if you can have self replicating mines you can have self replicating cloaked intelligent attack drones.